No U.S. state requires voters to prove that they have a traditional residence, but Americans experiencing homelessness still struggle to cast a ballot.

On Election Day morning, Markita Kornegay waited to vote in a line that stretched around the block from a side entrance of Miner Elementary School in Washington, D.C. Kornegay knew the drill: She’d voted for President Barack Obama at this polling place before, which was around the same time her son was born. But she wasn’t sure exactly what to expect this morning. She and her family now reside in a shelter for the homeless.

With three young children in tow, Kornegay told a poll worker that she needed to register to vote. She told the volunteer that she still receives her mail where she used to live, at a low-income apartment complex on Benning Road NE, the same address that appears on her driver’s license. But she doesn’t have any form of identification or official mail, not even a utility bill, that lists her current address as the Days Inn on New York Avenue NE—one of a dozen or so motels that the city leases as shelter space for families experiencing homelessness.

After some deliberation, Kornegay says, a poll worker told her that she was not in the correct “region” to vote. She needed to go to Mount Rainier, a nearby suburb in Maryland. That made no sense to Kornegay: She is a D.C. resident. “The shelter is not even five minutes away from here,” Kornegay says. “I feel irritated, because I came all the way here for nothing.”

Kornegay has more reason than most to make her voice heard in this election. While the District of Columbia’s three electoral college votes are a safe bet to go Clinton, the ballot includes several important local contests, including two At-Large D.C. Council positions and one seat on the D.C. State Board of Education. D.C. is currently implementing a controversial plan to build a series of shelters throughout the city and struggling with an affordable housing crisis, issues that directly affect Kornegay and her family.

Kornegay’s vote was lost to miscommunication.

“I can’t do nothing, because I’m not dragging my kids to another part [of the D.C. area] to vote,” Kornegay says.

Residents who live temporarily without a permanent address face enormous obstacles to voting. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, many people experiencing homelessness lack the appropriate identification documents required by some states to register or to vote. Many homeless people also (incorrectly) believe that they must prove that they have a traditional residence to vote, even though no state has any such requirement. This year, the Coalition launched a campaign, “You Don’t Need a Home to Vote,” in hopes of helping organizers run more successful registration drives among the homeless.

But the voting gap between low-income and higher-income earners is vast. In the 2012 presidential election, less than 50 percent of voters earning under $10,000 a year participated in the election; in the same election, more than 80 percent of those making $150,000 or more a year voted. Nearly 100 percent of the top 1 percent voted. Class bias is one of the clearest effects in U.S. elections. As Demos’s Sean McElwee observes, across the 2008, 2010, and 2012 elections, “there was only one instance of a poorer income bracket turning out at a higher rate than the bracket above them.”

At the polling place in Northeast D.C., the precinct captain explained to me after the fact that Kornegay’s vote was lost to miscommunication. She should have voted on a special ballot in another D.C. precinct—at the Mt. Horeb Baptist Church Annex, 2.5 miles away, as it turns out. Then, Kornegay would have two days to produce a government form of some kind listing the shelter as her address in front of the D.C. Board of Elections in order to certify her vote.

Miscommunication alone doesn’t account for the obstacles that prevented Kornegay from voting; even had she been given prompt, direct instructions, her single civic errand might have turned into three or four different trips. Overturning the persistent class bias in U.S. elections will mean making it easier for voters at every income level to participate in elections—especially those who have the most on the line.

In southwest Connecticut, the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in the country. Invisible walls created by local zoning boards and the state government block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it.